Conversations with the Po-Mo Crowd – An Interesting Dialogue on Why Words Have Meanings.

You can find the original conversation here. As this appeared on tumblr I’ve taken some editorial liberties with correcting spelling and grammar and adding titles to the speakers. I’ve had versions of this conversation before and of course, I was not nearly as eloquent as the final response was.

POMO: Terfs are always demanding a definition of womanhood– and its like… Idk what to tell ya. Its all made up. The only reason they demand a definition is because they think womanhood is based solely around genitalia… which is ironic because who else does that? Misogynistic cis men…👀

Material Reality: This is so incoherent lmfao

POMO: is it incoherent to you because you are uncomfortable that your politics line up with misogynists…? 🤔

MR: I don’t really care if you believe me or not but gender is made up. Its fake. Pretending there are “biological truths” to gender is not only illogical but hurts women.

MR: Also frankly I don’t give a fuck what you think of this post. It’s rather short and straightforward and you not understanding kind of seems like a personal problem. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

MR: Gender isn’t real, any radfem can tell you this lol we invented that just so you know. What’s incoherent is that if gender doesn’t exist, which is doesn’t, then the only way to define a woman is an adult human female :)

POMO: And here we get to the major issue.. which is that you seem to think that the (also fake, also constructed) “biological” naming of gender is somehow the “valid” version… is that it? Because if we are being honest here, what you just wrote is incomprehensible and laughably hypocritical.

POMO: If you want to continue putting people in boxes based on the shape of their genitalia (which i wouldn’t advise because quite frankly its reductive and insulting) then you should just use the technical terms. Acting like you believe and understand that gender is fake while simultaneously and desperately clinging to biological essentialism is inherently contradictory.

POMO: The thing is, you are still assigning gender to people, you’re just using different words. and to be quite honest, the only people who reduce women to their genitalia and call women “human females” are misogynistic cis men, which brings me back full circle to my original point which is to say that you lot have more in common with misogynists and there is really no way around it. You can keep trying to deny it but you simply cant make the above statement insisting that it makes any kind of sense. it just doesn’t. The fact that you refuse to see the faulty logic says more about your stubbornness and ignorance than anything else.

POMO: Now, since I’ve made my points and reblogged this ridiculous response, I will be disengaging from this conversation. Kindly read my words and do some thinking before responding, thank you.

——

MR: Postmodernism is a plague.

-Noam Chomsky

Okay. Let’s do it like this:

My female body is a reality, yes? I really have breasts, I really bleed once a month, I really have ovaries and a uterus and a cervix and a vagina and a clitoris. Those are undeniably real. I’ve even been karyotyped – my XX chromosomes are most certainly real. I’ve seen my own cells under a microscope – the Barr body (which, to simplify, holds the extra X chromosome) is definitely there. These physical realities have a word used to describe them: female.

Now, let’s review what words are and what they are for. A group agrees that a certain combination of sounds and/or letters will refer to a Thing. The whole group must agree somewhat on the meaning, or the word is functionally useless. Can you imagine trying to order food in a restaurant if the word “cheeseburger” meant something unique to each person? You would order a cheeseburger, and they’d bring you out a bowl of lettuce tossed with dressing and say “well this is what cheeseburger means to me, and you have no right to impose your definitions on me.” And then you’d have no cheeseburger. So, words are important. They represent a thing – a reality or an idea – and everyone in the group (usually, the speakers of that language) agrees on a meaning.

Got it? Good. Moving on.

So, I am female. Being female in a patriarchy comes attached to a certain kind of experience or set of experiences, among them, the experience of misogyny. These vary between time periods and cultures (we’ll come back to this) but all human females who are share similar experiences due only to their female bodies, and the more similar the context, the more similar the experience. There is a word for this: womanhood. That is the word that the vast, vast majority of the English-speaking world has used for hundreds (thousands? I’m not a linguist) of years to describe the experience of being a human female. Words have meanings. They do not get to mean something entirely different to each unique person because that defeats the purpose of language.

Now, let’s touch on how “womanhood” is different across time periods and cultures. 18th century British womanhood is very different from 6th century Chinese womanhood. Now, both these women are adult human females, and they will likely have some experiences in common. However, what it means to be a woman – how a woman looks, thinks, behaves – is drastically different in each context. That is due to a difference in the culturally imposed set of roles and behaviors deemed appropriate for a member of a certain sex. There is a word that sums up that nice long sentence: gender.

Gender is socially constructed. It is a tool of the patriarchy, designed to mark a certain class of people (males) as superior and the other class of people (females) as inferior. Across many different cultures and time periods, womanhood is associated with submissiveness. That is because women (females) are “”“supposed”“” to be the submissive class. Submissive to males. Femininity, the gender assigned to women, is almost synonymous with submission in the western world, and masculinity with dominance.

So you’re starting to see a system of domination and submission, of privilege and oppression, take place. To maintain this system, people are taught to occupy their gender role literally from birth. Because children are largely passive sponges for information, we internalize these roles, and, as children at least, understand the world in the context of them. By preschool, children already have a solid understanding of gender roles (girls do this, boys do that) and are usually very resistant to things that challenge this schema. So what I’m saying is, by preschool, boys (males) understand that their role is to dominate, to rule, and girls (females) understand that their role is to submit, to sacrifice.

No amount of playing around with language is going to change this system. All it is going to do is obscure it. So that brings me to my final point.

By this point in the argument, we can accept that females are an oppressed class. You seem like a person who is passionate about justice, so I’m sure you want all oppressed peoples to gain their liberation. But how does an oppressed group gain liberation? It’s a multi-step, multifaceted process, but there is something so crucial, so fundamental to the process that it’s often forgotten – the oppressed group needs the language to talk about their oppression. They need to be able to identify who is a member of the oppressed group, and who is an oppressor, a dominator. They need words for these things.

When you attempt to redefine words like “woman” to the point where they are meaningless, when you conflate gender with sex, you take these words away from an oppressed class. You erase their oppression. You place yet another obstacle in the way of their liberation.

So I guess I only have one question for you: Why would you do that?

I look forward to your answer.

Why would you do that indeed? It would seem to me that attempting to gain membership into an oppressed class, it would behoove those doing so, to learn about the fundamental oppression facing that class, and not further complicate the struggle.

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Appears very divisive from where I’m standing, which is not what the feminine cause needs. Slice and dice, and label and label until there are so many small fractions of a group nothing really gets done, because it gets sliced and diced to the point of mockery? In the end all the opposing group has to do is just stand back, laugh, and watch all the infighting. The cause (whichever one) needs Leadership, and with it, a figurehead or symbol which can stand and serve as leader. Why are so many within these groups so against such a thing?

Republicans have Regan which they invoke all the time. Blacks have MLK. Pacifists have Gandhi. Muslims have Allah, Christians have Jesus, Jews have God or the Holocaust. Occupy now has Bernie. Whether things or people these nouns all unify, and yet what does the feminist movement have? Nothing, it seems. Plus one hand tied behind their back (unification-wise) due to atheism, the other hand tied behind their back due to a disdain for leadership (in my opinion) because – I don’t know – a natural leadership structure resembles male power structures and therefore is viewed as either domination or repression in some way, if not simply likely “male” which makes some loser Internet “justice warrior” and “let’s find another label”-er’s hermaphroditic organs twist?

The cause needs a leader. Step up, Arb! Write a book. Put yourself out there. Nominate yourself as a leader and see how big of a following you can get. I mean that sincerely.

Equality has come a long way this past while, due in large part to the Internet and social media folks like yourself. Those are only “starts”, however, and the other side still has all the strength. Plus the math says that change will only really happen in one’s lifetime if SOMEONE steps up as a figurehead. Who’s got the guts to do it?

VR Kaine, what the fuck are you going on about. What a load of reactionary bullshit. Yes, obviously individual organizations need a leadership (which means: leading by serving), but a movement does not need one person to tell everyone what to do.

RITM – “The Arb would be a slightly inappropriate leader for feminism”. Really? Why is that?

TIO – “Why don’t you become a feminist leader? Don’t you have the guts?” My guts and expertise are applied daily in the corporate world where #1) it pays a lot more, and 2) I don’t have to work with losers who think they’re big people simply because they talk big in very small and insignificant spaces online.

Aside from that, however, it’s interesting that you’d rush in to defend your sweetie when it’s actually a compliment that I was paying him. As you’d know above all, Arb is highly intelligent, well-read, considerate, and well-balanced in his views. He may not like capitalism, for instance, but he also certainly doesn’t hate it which allows capitalists (like myself) to remain open to his views. This is what your side needs, and as with his views on capitalism I think Arb would have a similar impact on men he’s trying to “convert” to feminism if he indeed had a larger audience that he could share his views with. I sincerely believe action in that direction would tremendously help his cause, and I said as much.

Plus, as I’ve argued, the Feminist cause is desperate for a leader. There’s a huge vacuum in that space, and as with all power vacuums the more outlandish or boisterous someone is, the more space they occupy and the more oxygen they use up which effectively asphyxiates their cause.

That’s what seems to be happening in the feminist cause now, and besides that, look at pretty much any cause you’ve ever believed in before a leader actually steps in – total shitshow at best, and at worst, a joke that serves as fodder for people like Thunderf00t everyday. I propose that this is because your side has no clue what actual leadership is, or what a successful “movement” would involve if even you yourselves were part of it.

Your side is so bad at it, in fact, that you even alienate those people should be supporters of your cause by default. You completely turn them off, and as a result have remained a fringe minority for what – centuries now? If you want to tell me that’s because y’all are so great at causes, or that you’re so well-versed on what a “Successful Movement” is, then go ahead, but you’ve achieved very little in response to so much so-called “effort” that your side loves to sit back (on their hands) and praise.

I’m taking my shots in all of that, of course, but my words to Arb – although perhaps challenging – were hardly condescending. I truly think he’d be a great leader and I think he’d gain my and many other peoples’ support in going after that position. Your side desperately needs it, so if not Arb, who’d be better?

I had a read over at your blog. The “Libertarian Socialism” piece is interesting. Particularly, “A key difference between libertarian socialism and capitalist libertarianism is that advocates of the former generally believe that one’s degree of freedom is affected by one’s economic and social status”.

OK, so the more popular you are and the more money you have, the more freedom you have. Wow – that’s profound. Wouldn’t it make sense to anybody that with either more money or more popularity, there’s less you have to ask or require from other people and therefore you’d have more “freedom”? That’s simply how life and nature works – do you not fit in with either? Besides, even though they were both broke, Socrates did just fine under the libertarian model and so did Gandhi (people just gave them shit), so what’s your problem – that there should have been a defined wage they should have been given so they could buy more “freedom”? They didn’t want any!

Perhaps it’s whether or not one’s degree of freedom SHOULD be affected by one’s economic and social status. Enter now the socialism-lover who, when it comes to freedom (and not protection) although possessing the ability to earn more, they simply are too lazy to do it, so instead they either demand more from society, or they want to steal it.

If your thing is, “look at me and the oh-so-smart-label I wrapped around all my resentment for simply being a failure”, then I can see why you’d consider someone like me a “badass” that you’d feel threatened by. And I suppose you should feel threatened – us capitalists pretty much eat your lunch every day while you sit on your blog intellectualizing over all the scraps. It’s no wonder you’re hungry and angry!

“I honestly don’t give any shit what you think about my blog, buckaroo.”
“Buckaroo”? Haha! Well good for you Mr. Tremblay! I think your therapist would call that a breakthrough, wouldn’t they? Perhaps now you can stop pulling the wings off of flies, you little anarchist, you!! High fives all-around.

Now since you don’t have to give a shit about that pesky problem anymore, perhaps you can now spend time on how NOT to have any sort of capitalist continue to eat your lunch every day?

Just kidding. I don’t actually know you. But I do like that you have some Libertarian in your blood. Perhaps Libertarian Socialism has the answers, here. Beats the codependency you’re constantly hearing from the Bernie crowd, anyways.

Not that I can find – Vern says…’indelicate truths’, at least what he believes to be the truth and defends the heck out them.

He’s not always right and his contrarian nature often gets the best of him – but I let him comment here because having someone who thinks your ideology is shit and tell you so constantly (sometimes with reasons) keeps one on their intellectual toes, so to speak.

I’ve been busy over the week/weekend and see that I have to reply to a bunch of things in this thread. Some interesting stuff going on. :)